hurrengoa
magazine girls odlok   I’ve had to clean out my home library. I’ve got really good at playing Tetris on the shelves. And there’s hardly any space left. The paper’s about to eat me up. Some climbing magazines from 20 years ago have turned up on a shelf I hadn’t visited for some time. Loads of them. They’re from the days when I used to cycle away from school, tie my long hair up with a ribbon, put on an electric-blue catsuit and struggle over boulders.

In the first magazine I’ve picked up there’s Lynn Hill in Yosemite Park, on the The Capitan wall, doing The Nose free-style. It was just twenty years ago. She was the first person to do that route free-style. This woman from Detroit managed to do what nobody had done before. A year later, she covered that extremely difficult route’s 880 metres in less than 24 hours. Another ten years were to go by before Scott Burke managed to do The Nose free-style. Which makes it seem as if Hill had set the measure for the challenge.

At that time, I knew The Capitan’s routes almost by memory. I was able to get hold of the Yosemite Climber book, published by Georges Meyer in 1979, and I used to look at that mythical book’s photos time and again. I studied the diagrams of the routes, got ready my theoretical climbs on that giant wall... Thanks to that book, I actually got to think that I had climbed there. I turned my dreams into memories.

So you can understand that it was really difficult for a nutter like me not to love a woman like Lynn Hill. But Hill had a competitor for my heart: Catherine Destivelle. That climber, born in Oran, made me shiver all over. She had the same magnetism which French actresses usually have. It’s not easy to find people who are photogenic when they’re hanging from a wall. The rocks and eroticism come together in those photos of Destivelle. Being reincarnated in her magnesium
bag was my licentious desire.

What’s more, Destivelle was incredible at what she did. A year before Hill did the Nose free-style, Destivelle was the first woman to climb the Eiger wall. She did it in 17 hours. 17 hours!!! As well as winning many climbing championships, she climbed the mythical routes in the Alps ( Bonatti, Dru, Matterhom,... ) the Himalayas, the Antarctic and many other parts of the world solo during the 90’s. And, in spite of all the difficulties, they always looked slim and beautiful in the photos.

Lynn Hill and Catherine Destivelle. Just like in Charlie’s Angels, it was impossible to choose just one of them.

I can’t throw those climbing magazines out. I love the crazy, colourful clothes an photos from those years. A time when you didn’t have to queue up to climb a route, you took paper diagrams of the routes up with you, there were no mobile phones at weekends, Santa Barbara, Etxauri, Riglos, Midi D´Ossau, the Alps, and many vertical geographical experiences I’ve had come to mind. The heroes of the period. Wolfang Gullich, the best climber in history, died in a car crash in 1992; when he opened up 8c routes in France, lovable Englishman Ben Moon used to give them names of battles which the French army had lost; Patxi Arozena took climbing to a new level in our country. And, of course, Lynn Hill and Catherine Destivelle. I’ve so often climbed with them in my dreams... and something more than that too!